International Film Festival Rotterdam 2021: Interview with Director & Writer Jun Li of DRIFTING

As a follow-up to his 2018 directorial debut for Tracey, Jun Li has yet again created a compelling piece of contemporary Hong Kong cinema with Drifting. The film examines homelessness and addiction in the region and does so with both honesty and warmth. Drifting had its world premiere at the 2021 edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Li spoke with Film Inquiry about his remarkable film.

Wilson Kwong for Film Inquiry: Let’s start off by talking about your background in journalism. How did that play into your creative process for this film?

Jun Li: Well, I first got in touch with the community when I was a student journalist and I wrote an article when the clearance on the street happened. I went to interview them and report on the incident back in 2012. After that, I did a lot of other things and I went abroad. When I got back to Hong Kong in 2016, I went there again because of a different film project. It was not about the homeless community, but about a Chinese medic who went to peoples’ homes to give them treatment. And on one of those visits, I realized they used a lot of wood to build houses. They built fences around their living area and it was very cinematic. So I started to write a script around 2018, and that’s how the idea of this project came about.

And did that journalism background help in terms of interviewing the homeless people or the general research process?

Jun Li: I don’t know, because I don’t exactly know what you gain from a journalism degree. I used a very humanistic approach, and a very big focus on how to convey a story, while not hurting your subjects. So that was the most important part that informed my filmmaking process.

Got it. Can you talk about the location of the film? Particularly for audiences who might not know Hong Kong’s geography that well, and what the broader social context of the film’s location is.

June Li: So most of the scenes were shot in Sham Shui Po, and even when we couldn’t shoot in the original place, we found a place close to it, and still along the western corridor. It’s sometimes considered the slum of Hong Kong, so it’s a very condensed area with a lot of subdivides and units in old buildings. But at the same time, it’s changing. Along the coastal line, there are many more expensive condos, going towards the inner city.

It’s interesting because this kind of displacement and gentrification seems to be happening everywhere in the world. One thing that interested me was the fact that the film was shot during the Hong Kong protests. And we obviously don’t see that in the film, but did the protests affect your shooting process at all? Were there plans to maybe include some of that in the film as well?

June Li: It was hard logistically because we shot the film in November. It was the most intense month during the whole protest, so there were logistic problems because major roads were blocked at that time. It was hard to get to the location if you did not live in Kowloon. I live in Kowloon, but a lot of the actors did not, so it was very hard to continue and focus on anything else other than what’s happening in Hong Kong. But at the same time, it’s quite impossible for us to pause things, so we had to accommodate the situation a lot. And now I wish that I shot the protest into the film, but we didn’t because I thought it was a 2012 story. But it actually doesn’t matter because the stories still happen nowadays. So even though the lawsuit was in 2012, the clearance still happens every few months.

In terms of the actors in the film, Francis Ng is one of my favorite actors of all time, so it was nice seeing him in such a good role. His physicality, facial expressions, and everything about his character was so specific. Did the two of you collaborate together in coming up with that performance, or did he just show up on set and perform in his own way?

Jun Li: Well, I think we didn’t really do a lot of preparation. But whenever he appears on set, he would sleep alongside other street sleepers because they’re just on the other block. So he would see how they take drugs on the street, and he saw the physicality of it, and he also watched all the documentaries that I sent him. I think the way he talks really sounds like one of the people that I met. But we didn’t really discuss a lot about his approach to the character. I think he was just right when he appeared on set.

And how was it having veteran actors like Ng, Loletta Lee and Tse Kwan Ho work alongside some younger and newer actors (Cecilia Choi, Will Or, Pak Hon Chu)? Did you find that you had to spend a lot more time with the younger actors and coach them through the process?

Jun Li: We actually didn’t have a lot of time preparing for their roles. But two of them have a lot of stage experience, which is very different because they are willing to improvise and make it more lively. That’s a very important quality to the whole cast because a lot of things were improvised on set and they had the ability to do that.

Was having improvisation in the film always planned?

June Li: Things happened, and I just kept rolling, like in that scene when they were protesting. So in the script, during the interview of Francis Ng’s character, after he said everything, he stopped and the scene stopped there. But then he started yelling the slogan again and forgot the other line, but he actually really forgot it. And then Tse Kwan Ho, the actor who played Master, repeated the other line to him and then he yelled again. Then the social worker started yellowing the slogan again, and it was all improvised, but they were all attentive to what others were doing.

There have been films about homelessness and addiction in Hong Kong, but not all of them are very socially conscious. When you set out to make Drifting, were you always planning on making something that was really socially conscious?

Jun Li: I think it was always on my mind, and maybe it’s from my journalist background. I think there’s a societal part to any moving images, so that’s what I’m always concerned with. I have less concern with style, so the two films actually look very different. The first one (Tracey) looks very middle class and very bourgeois. The whole set and camera movement, it’s very different. But I knew when I was writing this story that it wouldn’t work with that kind of treatment. So it’s just very natural for me to not make it in the same way. So it looks very different, and the topic is very different. I think it’s for the sake of that story, that’s what I as a director, would need to achieve.

I know this isn’t a film about the Hong Kong protests, but some of the things that these characters are going through almost captures some of the things that the protestors went (are going) through. Was that something that you were trying to achieve, especially since you could see people protesting while shooting the film?

Jun Li: So the vibe of the film is very different than what I had on the script, and the ending is different. At the beginning of the writing process, the last part of the script wasn’t there. There wasn’t an argument about what would happen if they were to stop or continue along, that was written after the summer of 2019. So I think the words that are coming out of Hong Kong from this time, would be a little different than before because we are in a different place now.

Shifting gears a bit, what kind of films did you watch growing up?

Jun Li: Of course, I watched a lot of Hong Kong movies. But growing up, it’s very different because I grew up watching a lot of commercial films. But then in university, I started watching different films from different places. I think one of the most influential ones for me was Ken Loach’s films, and the other one was Spike Lee’s. And Stanley Kwan too, but in a different way, because it was in a queer way. There was also Ann Hui. So when I grew up, I didn’t really have a preference to what I liked. It was just going to the cinema to hang out, and it wasn’t until university that I really tried to find different films that I really liked.

And how do you think you fit into Hong Kong cinema moving’s future? Specifically in the context of how international audiences have mainly identified Hong Kong cinema with the likes of Wong Kar Wai, Johnny To, Ann Hui, and just the older class of filmmakers that came from the region.

Jun Li: I’ve been asked this question a lot, but always in a different context because people are always worried that Hong Kong cinema isn’t the way it was before and that it’ll never be like that again. But everyone is struggling and the industry is shrinking, and it’s under this context that I’m usually asked the question. It’s very different though, because we come from a very different background of film. Filmmakers of my generation, we come from a very socially conscious background. It’s not even just about 2019 or 2014 (i.e. the recent protests), it’s starting from the Queen’s Pier in 2008. We’re very different from the generation before. So a lot of us have preferred a more humanistic approach to a story. But also because we don’t have money, and we face a lot of competition now. In the past, it was just us, but now everyone has good work, so how we keep up with that is very important. But I think Hong Kong has its own audience, so we never used to think about who got into what film festival. But now, people are becoming more aware of that, because we don’t have a lot of work anymore.

Is being showcased at international film festivals still on the minds of filmmakers right now then?

Jun Li: I would be dishonest if I said I didn’t care about it. I do care, but at the same time, I want to shoot a film that resonates with the local audience. That has a mass appeal. At the same time, they have some edge that mainstream commercial films would not offer. So that’s what I was thinking about when I was making my last 2 films. It’s not forever, in the future I might do something else. But in these past two films, I tried to do something that wasn’t talked about a lot in a narrative way, and in a way that people would understand very easily. So when I talk to a lot of programmers, they would say that this is a very local film, this is hard to communicate with international audiences because the way you tell a story is very ‘Chinese’. So that happens and I’m aware of that, but somehow I’m still trying got do both. But sometimes it just doesn’t happen. So as a filmmaker, you have to choose what kind of market you want to get into. What kind of films do you want to make, and what kind of films you want to make this specific time, and be aware of that.

Film Inquiry thanks Jun Li for his time.